WAYNE KNUCKLES: Horse Racing Continues to Drop in Popularity

Something happened this year that has never happened to me before.

The Belmont Stakes ran. And I didn't know it.

Not until after.

I've watched horse racing the way most people watch it — not obsessively, but dependably. I wasn't the guy with the Racing Form and a pencil behind his ear. I was the guy who knew when to turn on the television. Every spring, the Triple Crown was a kind of liturgical calendar. Derby.

Preakness. Belmont. You circled the Saturdays. You made a mint julep or you didn't, but you knew.

This year? Nothing.

I could blame senility. It's a reasonable suspect. But there's more going on here than my aging memory.

The Belmont Stakes was run at Saratoga Race Course for the second straight year — not at the old Belmont Park in New York where it belongs. Belmont Park is in the middle of a $455 million renovation that won't be done for a while yet. So the race with the longest history in American thoroughbred racing has been displaced. Playing it at Saratoga is like playing the World Series in a minor league stadium. Fine track. Wrong address.

And no Triple Crown chase. Again.

The Kentucky Derby winner, Sovereignty, skipped the Preakness. Journalism won the Preakness but had narrowly missed winning the Derby. So the third race arrived with no drama, no horse chasing history, no reason for casual fans to care. Just under four million people watched, which Fox Sports called a success. They called it a five percent increase from the year before.

A five percent increase over four million people is still four million people.

To put that in context: the Super Bowl draws over a hundred million.

Horse racing isn't dying in a single dramatic crash. It's going out the way a lot of things go out — quietly, gradually, with occasional press releases claiming a turnaround is right around the corner.

2024 was the third straight year of declining parimutuel wagering on thoroughbred races in the United States. Thoroughbred racing declined again in the first quarter of 2025 — race days down, total money bet down. Freehold Raceway in New Jersey, which had been running horses for over 170 years, closed at the end of 2024. The general manager said there was no plausible way forward.

That's a hard sentence to read.

The core demographic is aging men. Younger gamblers don't want to stand at a window and study a program. They want to tap a phone and bet a quarterback. Sports betting ate horse racing's lunch, and horse racing handed over the tray.

I'm not here to write an obituary. The Kentucky Derby still pulls a crowd. The horses are still beautiful. Horse deaths on U.S. tracks actually hit their lowest rate on record in 2024, which matters to a lot of people who stopped watching partly because of that.

But something has slipped. The sport lost its grip on the casual fan — the guy like me, who wasn't a devotee but was always aware. Who knew when to turn on the TV.

This year I didn't.

That's not nothing.

Wayne Knuckles has edited and published newspapers in Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida and Georgia. He currently publishes a free weekly newsletter about Appalachian history, news, food and travel. You can sign up for free at www.thewaynetrain.com.